Two significant pieces of news from Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis.
The technical bit is that RON token staking on the validators that run its Ronin blockchain has gone live.
This is part of the process as Ronin moves towards a more decentralized delegated proof of stake consensus. It means anyone with RON tokens can now choose to stake them to a validation node and hence gain rewards for helping to operate and secure the blockchain.
There are currently 22 node operators but anyone with the requisite technical knowledge and 250,000 RON tokens can now also set up a node.
The consumer bit of the news is that Sky Mavis has announced the first set of thirdparty developers who will deploying games on Ronin. Up-to-this-point, only Axie Infinity and community-developed games using those assets have been live.
The companies announced are:
Directive Games with topdown team-shooter The Machines Arena
Tribe Studio with community engagement platform and MMO Tribesters: Land of Solas
SkyVu Games with 3x3 mobile shooter Battle Bears Heroes
Bali Games with Axie-themed match-3 game Axie Champions, and
Bowled.io with its mobile cricket-themed sports platform
What’s interesting about these choices is that three of them are mobile games, which chimes with Axie’s geographical audience footprint in south east Asia. Given Sky Mavis’ troubles getting Axie Infinity through app store approvals, how it chooses to distribute these games will be significant.
I’m guessing it solves this by releasing APKs, particularly as Bowled.io’s audience is mainly Indian. It’s also worth pointing out that PC game The Machine Arena is already listed on the Epic Game Store.
And in terms of the type of games offered — with the exception of Tribe Studio — the genres are also the sort of key ones we’d expect to appeal to a broadly casual audience. Tribesters is clearly the outlier, given that as well as building a game, it’s also creating a wider platform for the entire Ronin ecosystem.
Still, I expect this to be only the first wave of games announced for Ronin. As the Big List shows, there are hundreds of blockchain games in development and even most of the good ones don’t have a good product market fit.
This is a problem Ronin — with an existing player base (albeit for Axie), and plenty of hard and soft resources — has the potential to solve.
Devs can sign up for more details about how to get that process started here.
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ARC8 Update news
Web3 mini-game collection Arc8 has highlighted its plans to decentralize its platform during 2023. The plan is to allow GMEE token holders to take over governance, deciding which games are included and how players are rewarded for playing them.
As part of that process, it’s adding features to give the token deeper functionality. This includes requiring it for certain payment options such as breeding and evolving its G-Bot NFTs, as well as using it as a voting mechanism.
At present, there are 53,800 wallets holding the token, 93% of which are on Polygon. This move will be backed with a token buy-back program.
In terms of game functionality, the new Arc8 app will see the launch of live multiplayer, new web3 competitive modes and NFT gated tournaments. The goal of these changes is to move Arc8 from a play-to-earn model, towards a play-to-own model.
Champions Ascension Whitepaper news
As a long-term NFT holder, it’s good to see Champions Ascension rolling out a very comprehensive whitepaper. I guess the headline takeaway is that the game — which currently has all its NFTs on Ethereum — is actually going to be running on a Polygon Supernet, while using Forte for all its onboarding and financial rails.
It’s a big win for Forte, which has seemed beleaguered since its $725 million Series B in November 2021. Champions Ascension is by far its highest profile game, but with the likes of Superteam and N3twork also committed to the platform, it looks like there’s been some of under-the-radar progress.
In terms of Champions Ascension’s gameplay and meta, the whitepaper fills in a lot of gaps around how characters level up and evolve, as well as the complexity of the economy — with resources such as essence, bone and gold — not to forget the risks of asset permadeath, gear creation, the benefits of land and pet ownership etc.
Certainty, there’s nothing in there to reduce my enthusiasm that Plai Labs is cooking a product that’s firmly in the vanguard of blockchain gaming.
Baby Dragons In DigiDaigaku This Week news
Bring it on!
Additional Links
Y00ts has started its migration from Solana to Polygon, with around two-thirds of the 15,000-strong NFT collection already moved. The floor price is 1.8 ETH.
Following the launch of zkEVMs from Polygon and Matter Labs, Conseys has launched its testnet version of tech, now called Linea.
Hardware wallet outfit Ledger has raised €100 million at its June 2021 valuation of €1.3 billion. Post-FTX, it posted its best ever monthly sales figures during November 2022.
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